I think that transmitting the model is important too, otherwise the methods for acquiring these skills risks being lost. Do you not think however that the student has also got to do some of the work? In other words, they have to 'find' this skill with the aid of a teacher rather than sit in a big black chair and have Neo plug it in to the back of their head?

Mike

I was never expected or needed to use any great amount of intellectual reasoning to find skill. Intuitive reasoning at most. I was just shown what I need to train, no more. What I was and am expected to do, though, is the repetitive daily work of training into my body what I was shown. Just by showing me what I need to train, the teacher hasn't done any real work for me. He can't train this stuff into my body for me. I've still got years of work ahead of me, mostly by myself.

It's just, instead of spending 5+ years trying to figure out even what I'm supposed to be working on, before I can devote another 5 years to actually training it into the body, I can just go straight to training it into the body. This is especially important because the subject matter is formless: just mimicking what the teacher appears to be doing externally would never teach what's going on, especially because most of the time you can't even see it. So there is a great emphasis on verifiable transmission, to make sure you're actually getting everything.